Looking back, it’s a textbook case of a career-ending move. Talk-show host Don Imus is going along just fine with his daily radio program. Suddenly, literally within a single second, everything changes. In a phrase so highly compressed and volatile that it manages to pack gender bias, racial slur, and sexual insult into three words, Imus’s career is shattered. Within days, as public outrage builds and advertisers pull their accounts, he’s been fired from his ten-million-dollar-a-year position.

What does that tell us? It’s not that Imus was the soul of sliminess, lacking all trace of a social conscience. Known for his philanthropy, he used his personal wealth for more than personal luxury, donating to nonprofit causes that mattered to him.

Nor was that cause-related conscience only superficial. Unlike some in the talk-show industry, he didn’t mount programs that were routinely vacuous and inane. By many accounts, he was a good interviewer who asked incisive questions. And because his program reached millions, a slot during his air time was a sought-after billet for noteworthy authors, performers, politicians, and others whose success depends on popularity.

And if the hallmark of his popularity was less the serious discourse than the campy edge of his humor, that too made programmatic sense. It kept his audiences engaged, expectant, and coming back for more. Working within the long tradition of satire, he poked holes in social pretension with provocative glee. An equal-opportunity assailant, his program fired off its insolence at every moving target, including himself and his wife.

In the end, however, it was that very humor that destroyed him. As every comedian knows, there’s a line beyond which humor turns into contempt. What makes things funny, typically, is the juxtaposition of unexpected opposites — looking at something and seeing something else, placing ordinary figures in extraordinary situations to expose their foibles, catching the reason at right angles to the intuition. Humor is a highly intelligent genre, which is why it’s been said that life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel. It’s also a highly culture-specific genre, making comedy notoriously hard to translate and causing us to be only mildly amused at jokes from other countries that dissolve their own citizens in helpless laughter.

That explains, too, why humor is so group-specific, and why one person’s jest can be another’s indignity. It was on that very point, of course, that Imus lost it. He must have known, all along, that his comedy lay close along the edge of disrespect, spite, and outrage. He probably trusted his instincts to keep him safer than some of the more outrageous shock-jocks of contemporary culture. Playing his comedy like an extreme sport, he must have sensed that the danger was always out there, waiting to consume him. So when his three words brought him slamming into the moral thermocline, there was no going back. The public rose in offense and extracted its terminal punishment.

Did the punishment fit the crime? Those who think it didn’t point out that the words he used to describe the young women of the Rutgers University basketball team — “nappy-headed hos” — are no worse than the language used by black rappers against their own culture. That, however, doesn’t make it right. Those on the inside of a culture have always had license to critique their own as outsiders never can: What I say in criticism of myself and my family turns into egregious disrespect if said by someone unconnected to my experience.

But there’s a more serious point here, one that makes the Imus case particularly repugnant. The three issues that his words put into play — gender equality, sexual dignity, and racial harmony — are ones that the United States has been grappling with for centuries. In the last few decades we’ve made real progress. That progress may not have shown up yet in all the right demographics. Women still live under glass ceilings, genuine affection is still sadly missing from public presentations of sexuality, and the bigotry of low-intensity racism still encrusts some of our most important institutions. But at least officially and in our broad public discourse, we care. The language and the policy of our nation, if not always our actions and our attitudes, now stand firmly in favor of progress in these areas. Of course there are throwbacks, resistances, deliberate underminings, and even explicit rantings against such progress. But the trend is moving onward.

In that sense, Imus found himself swept into the backwash. The popular culture he loved and supported was, in the end, still too immersed in its past to see that what used to be counted as funny had at last crossed the line. It still laughed at what was once satire but had simply become bad taste. Imus, apparently, didn’t see the trend-line changing.

But then, neither did the rest of us. In the days following his insult, the question that hung in the air was, Will Imus survive? Will this, too, be brushed under the carpet for the sake of the wealth and ratings he is producing for his stations? Or will a line finally be drawn in the airspace? In those few days, something collectively seemed to rise up around the values of respect, responsibility, and fairness. This, we seemed to be saying, is not who we are. We can do better. We can find a higher standard.

What, then, to make of Don Imus? Wish him well for everything he’s done for us, tip the hat to the departure of a sharp comic talent, but shed no tears over his failure to survive the moral limits of shock. The trend, it seems, is beginning to take us upward.

©2007 Institute for Global Ethics

The April 2 commentary about the anti-plagiarism program Turnitin prompted many responses, including several from educators and students who are affected in some way by plagiarism and the efforts to stop it.

The commentary essentially argued that it is inconsistent to adopt an honor code while insisting that students submit their works through a plagiarism-detection program. It also held that technological solutions don’t always prove to be accurate or efficient and are not an ideal way to monitor human behavior.

Responses to those arguments broke about fifty-fifty in agreement and disagreement. Among the more commonly cited arguments opposed to the commentary’s view was the fact that technological monitoring provides a net benefit in other areas of society, and that philosophical arguments against it are outweighed by practical results.

One reader, who teaches a course in leadership and ethics, used a traffic-camera analogy: “Lawyers argue a driver’s ‘rights’ are infringed as though it were okay to speed through an intersection because you were talking on your cell phone, eating a burger, and late for an appointment. Legal, yes. Ethical? Let’s see you get T-boned at an intersection and then turn around and argue against stopping people running red lights just ‘because.’ “

A response by the head of an education association also invoked the traffic-control analogy. “We frequently hear complaints by speeders of the ‘unfairness’ of radar cameras catching them speeding. Any moral indignation by the rest of us about that? All the data shows that the vast majority of students at the high school and college level admit to cheating, and the paper mills on the Internet facilitate the dishonesty. Turnitin is one way to discourage what is so tempting. Let’s call it a tool that should accompany the speed limit signs you post in your ethical admonishments to your students as each semester begins.”

But others were less comfortable with technological monitoring. An educator noted that while we (generally) willingly submit to traffic cameras and radar guns, there has to be a point at which monitoring is no longer appropriate: “We could probably reduce fraud by requiring a lie-detector test for the recipients of a bank loan, but would we, or should we, sanction that?”

Some had doubts about the basic workability of systems that monitor plagiarism. A former graduate student writes that he was unjustly accused of plagiarism and as a result failed a class after another system (not Turnitin) used at his institution flagged phrases such as “furthermore, we can see…” and “due to this.” Another reader, a businessman, cited what he saw as the futility of technological dueling: “Look at … recent doping and steroid scandals. They have been testing for years and have had significant finds, yet there is a community of scientists and researchers working right now on new drugs to evade detection.” Another speculated that if you build a big enough database, “everyone will be guilty of plagiarism. Where does it end?”

Some respondents agreed with the premise that an honor code and good role modeling would be more effective than technology, and some also argued that the “presumption of guilt” implicit in the use of a detection system degrades trust between teacher and student.

Regardless of their view on technological monitoring of plagiarism, though, readers’ comments strongly reinforced how corrosive the problem has become in the academic world. Several educators wrote that not only has plagiarism become rampant, but that it apparently has gained a measure of acceptance as well. A college professor concluded that “the most disturbing outcome of this entire furor is the increasing number of students and parents that believe you have to use any means available to you to get ahead, including cheating.”

A high school teacher wrote that she was confronted by an angry parent who didn’t dispute that her daughter’s paper was plagiarized, but insisted that it was unfair that the teacher did not do a blanket search on unsuspicious papers, leading to a suggestion from the administration that the teacher should use Turnitin to avoid the appearance of an unfair situation. “[T]his type of parent interaction is becoming more common, where parents are more concerned with why their child was caught than with what rule their child broke,” she wrote.

A school administrator concluded: “For those who are really concerned, I wish they could experience the audacity of parents who charge into our school and challenge every reasonable effort to discipline — not punish — their children when honor code violations occur. These parents challenge the effort or the method for determining [the plagiarism], no matter that the evidence is clear and often embarrassingly damning in proving no attempt by the student to honorably or honestly complete the assignment.”

“What matters to us most is that the men and women of NBC Universal have confidence in the values we have set for this company. This is the only decision that makes that possible.”

“There have been any number of other comments that have been enormously hurtful to far too many people. And my feeling is that there should not be a place for that on MSNBC…. What price do you put on your reputation? And the reputation of the news division means more to me than advertising dollars. Because if you lose your reputation, you lose everything.”

DURHAM, N.C.
A criminal case that originally caused an uproar over the ethics of race, class, and privilege — but then morphed into a blistering controversy over accusations of a rush to judgment by the media and lack of judgment by a zealous prosecutor — wound down last week as North Carolina’s top law enforcement official dropped rape charges against three Duke lacrosse players.

As Time magazine notes, North Carolina attorney general Roy Cooper not only declared that the evidence in the case did not hold up, but used a word virtually unheard of in the universe of prosecutors, describing the accused as “innocent.”

Cooper took over the case after the state bar association filed ethics charges against the original prosecutor, Durham district attorney Mike Nifong, claiming he may have withheld evidence that could have cleared the players and made inflammatory statements about the case, reports the Charlotte Observer.

Cooper went on to say that the players were victims of a “tragic rush to accuse” on the part of Nifong, saying Nifong was a “rogue” prosecutor who was “overreaching,” according to the Washington Post.

Nifong later apologized to the athletes and concurred with the attorney general’s decision to drop the case, saying, “It is my sincere desire that the actions of Attorney General Cooper will serve to remedy any remaining injury that has resulted from these cases.” The Post characterizes the remarks as an apparent plea for the athletes not to take any further action, such as a civil suit.

While prosecutors are generally immune from suits against them based on what happened in a courtroom, some of Nifong’s actions, such as calling the lacrosse players “a bunch of hooligans,” could expose him to civil liability, according to an analysis by the Associated Press. Nifong also is facing ethics charges that could result in being disbarred.

The New York Times reports that the thee former teammates — Reade Seligmann, David Evans, and Collin Finnerty — expressed relief but also anger against Nifong and the news media.

“This entire experience has opened my eyes up to a tragic world of injustice I never knew existed,” Seligmann said, according to the Times. “If police officers and a district attorney can systematically railroad us with absolutely no evidence whatsoever, I can’t imagine what they’d do to people who do not have the resources to defend themselves. So rather than relying on disparaging stereotypes and creating political and racial conflicts, all of us need to take a step back from this case and learn from it.”

The case had widened fault lines over race and class. Some claimed the incident signified white, privileged student athletes abusing a poor black woman, leading to a series of emotional demonstrations on the Duke campus and in the racially mixed community of Durham.

Controversy over the incident also prompted Duke’s president to cancel the remainder of the lacrosse team’s season.

NEW YORK
After unrelenting pressure from activists and sponsors, CBS Corp. last week canceled its popular “Imus in the Morning” radio program after controversial shock-jock Don Imus uttered a racial slur the week before when referring to members of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team.

MSNBC, which carried a television simulcast of the program, also canceled the show.

The Los Angeles Times reports that CBS president and chief executive Leslie Moonves announced the firing in an email to network employees, saying that the controversy had gone beyond an isolated remark.

“One thing is for certain: This is about a lot more than Imus,” the email read. “As has been widely pointed out, Imus has been visited by presidents, senators, important authors and journalists from across the political spectrum. He has flourished in a culture that permits a certain level of objectionable expression that hurts and demeans a wide range of people. In taking him off the air, I believe we take an important and necessary step not just in solving a unique problem, but in changing that culture.”

Calls for Imus’s removal had come from a member of the CBS board of directors and several sponsors, including American Express, Proctor & Gamble, and Sprint, dropped the show.

At Rutgers University, Imus’s comments sparked a protest and a resolution from the student government association condemning the remarks, reports the Daily Targum, the campus newspaper.

Imus had met with the team members and offered an apology, which was accepted in an announcement from coach C. Vivian Stringer, according to UPI.

“We … accept Mr. Imus’s apology. We are in the process of forgiving,” Stringer said during a news conference Friday. “We still find his statements to be unacceptable.”

In the aftermath of the controversy, some media experts interviewed by the San Jose Mercury News predict that Imus’s sacking may lead to a new era of civility on radio. “It’s momentous that a network has decided to exercise a principle of responsibility over a professional loudmouth,” Todd Gitlin, professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University, told the paper. “This may turn the tide of verbal laissez-faire that has prevailed for 20 years.”

WASHINGTON
An ethics scandal has the World Bank president’s job hanging by a thread as directors of the institution scrutinize his decision to grant a raise and promotion to a staffer with whom he is romantically linked.

Bloomberg reports that Paul Wolfowitz has apologized for his actions.

Reuters reports that Wolfowitz, the former No. 2 man in the Bush administration’s Defense Department, signed off on the raise and promotion for Shaha Riza without a review by the World Bank’s board or ethics committee, according to a statement from the bank’s board of directors.

Riza was given raises that boosted an annual pay package to about $200,000 when she was reassigned from the World Bank to the U.S. State Department, reports the Agence France-Presse. She remained on the World Bank payroll despite her move, which was engineered to avoid conflicts of interest after Wolfowitz took charge of the World Bank in 2005, according to the AFP report.

Critics within the World Bank have begun clamoring for his resignation, and last week were joined by various political figures, including Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, the Financial Times reports.

AUSTIN
A judge last week granted a Texas family’s plea to keep their critically ill baby alive, ruling that the infant should not be removed from life support under the state’s controversial “futile care” law.

CBS News and the Associated Press report that Children’s Hospital of Austin says there is no hope for 17-month-old Emilio Gonzales and invoked a state law that allows hospitals to remove life support within 10 days of notifying the family that further efforts are hopeless.

An ethics committee at the hospital voted last month to end life support, saying recovery from the rare disease afflicting the boy is impossible and he would die within an hour if removed from the machines that are sustaining him.

Local cable station News 8 Austin reports that the family has asked 31 other hospitals to accept the child and keep him on life support, but so far none has agreed.

The attorney for the family argues that the decision by the hospital’s ethics committee was tainted. “You have a treating doctor who makes the initial decision, then you have an ethics committee at that same hospital with, frankly, a very clear conflict of interest,” Jerri Lynn Ward told Austin’s KEYE-TV. “They have something, a bed they can free up basically, if their decision goes unchallenged.”

State lawmakers last week heard emotional testimony from Gonzales’s mother in a debate over a measure that would require doctors to continue treatment in such cases until another facility agrees to take over, according to report from the Austin Statesman.

Critics, including some doctors and medical ethicists, call the bill a political and fundraising stunt that will prolong suffering for the terminally ill, according to the Dallas Morning News.

SAN FRANCISCO
Web surfers should be warned when they encounter blogs that contain “crude language,” according to a draft blogging code of conduct drawn up by Internet pioneers Tim O’Reilly and Jimmy Wales.

O’Reilly, the publisher known for coining the term “Web 2.0″ and Wales, who founded the user-edited Internet reference Wikipedia, say they are concerned by recent cases of cyber-bullying and a lack of civility on the Internet, according to a report from the Australian Age.

O’Reilly and Wales decided to propose the code after blogger Kathy Sierra became involved in a dispute over technology issues that escalated into an exchange that reportedly involved death threats and her picture posted alongside a depiction of a noose, according to the London Daily Telegraph.

The BBC reports that the proposed code calls for bloggers to ban anonymous comments and delete abusive posts, which are defined as those meant to “abuse, harass, stalk, or threaten others.” The code also called on bloggers to refrain from libel, infringement of copyright, and violations of privacy.

According to a summary in the International Herald Tribune, O’Reilly and Wales have prepared various sets of principles, some more restrictive than others, each corresponding to a badge that would be displayed on the page, indicating to readers what kind of behavior would be expected and tolerated.

But the proposals immediately came under sharp criticism from many in the virtual world, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. “I’m rather resentful of someone who has the temerity to tell me how they think I should behave,” Jeff Jarvis, a professor and director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York, told the Chronicle. “The miscreants who need their meds aren’t going to sign the code, let alone adhere to it.”

LONDON
The ethics of classroom behavior dominated headlines in Britain last week following the release of a controversial report recommending the use of praise, rather than punishment, to control the unruly.

According to a report from the BBC, recently released national guidelines say teachers should praise pupils five times more than they criticize, and that disruptive pupils should be given prizes or letters sent to their parents in order to reinforce any improvement.

The idea received a cool reception from many teachers, whose national union is considering a strike over demands that teachers not be forced to teach unruly children.

The London-based Independent reports that delegates at the National Union of Teachers’ annual conference say they have been hit, spat at, and even stabbed by unruly pupils.

At the same time, another section of the report does specify that teachers have a right to use physical force against violent pupils, according to the Times of London. Teachers are given the green light to restrain pupils who are harming themselves or others, confiscate cell phones or personal stereos if they are being used against regulations, and search pupils suspected of carrying weapons.

In a related story, Britain’s education secretary told the union conference that video-posting websites should ban video clips of teachers and students who have become the target of cyber-bullying, the U.K. Guardian reports. In a statement prepared for the conference, Alan Johnson maintained that “the online harassment of teachers is causing some to consider leaving the profession because of the defamation and humiliation they are forced to suffer.”

VARIOUS DATELINES
Stories related to corruption and were featured in various world-press reports last week. Among them:

• In France, presidential candidate Nicolas Sarkozy denied press reports that he cut a deal with president Jacques Chirac, offering Chirac protection from prosecution in a series of financial scandals in return for Chirac’s endorsement. The Paris-based International Herald Tribune reports that Chirac may face a raft of legal problems once his current immunity from prosecution — granted by law to sitting French presidents — expires at the end of his term in May. The Herald Tribune reports that Chirac has been under investigation for several years over alleged financing irregularities when he served as mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995.
• China’s government now will mandate nationwide prices for prescription drugs in order to stop what officials say is profiteering by hospitals, doctors, and nurses who allegedly sometimes ask patients for bribes in order to prescribe certain drugs. According to the paper Shanghai Daily, the government also will crack down on the approval procedures for new pharmaceuticals in order to prevent producers from changing the names of the drugs in a bid to escape the planned price controls.
• Singapore will give a raise to ministerial-level officials, upping their salaries by an average 60 percent and totaling a breathtaking $1.25 million by the end of 2008, according to a report from BusinessWeek. Officials say the high salaries are necessary in order to attract top talent and head off the threat of corruption.

CINCINNATI
Police in Ohio are testing a hand-held scanner that can tell police if a suspect is on one of 140 watch lists, an advance hailed by police as a breakthrough in fighting crime.

The device is raising ethical concerns among privacy advocates who say it is another symptom of the approach of Big Brother, UPI reports.

Known as the Mobilisa m2500 Defense ID system, the device reads magnetic strips or barcodes on ID cards, passports, and driver’s licenses. USA Today reports that within a second it can identify whether the person is a fugitive from justice, has convictions for violent crimes, or is a convicted sex offender.

The device also checks against watch lists from the Drug Enforcement Agency and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, reports the Cincinnati Enquirer News Service.

From Harris Interactive®:

“A survey by Harris Interactive® found that large numbers of people believe that they are influenced by the direct to consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription drugs. Between 21 and 51 percent agree with 10 statements about how they are influenced by DTCA, with 30 percent or more agreeing with eight of the 10 statements. While 30 to 50 percent of adults are not a majority, they represent many millions of people who believe that they are influenced by DTCA….

“Fifty one percent of adults believe that DTCA encourages them to ask additional questions when visiting their physician. Forty two percent believe that DTCA increases the number of questions they have regarding prescription drugs. Forty four percent believe that DTCA makes them more knowledgeable about treatments they previously did not already know about. Forty two percent believe that DTCA provides useful information on the risks of using prescription medications. Forty one percent believe that DTCA provides useful information on the benefits of prescription medications, while another forty one percent believe that DTCA increases their knowledge of prescription medications.

“Substantial but smaller numbers also believe that DTCA increases their general concerns about using prescription medications (38%) and about their physiciansÆ judgments in prescribing medications (24%)….

“Most of the results of this survey suggest that DTCA has a positive impact on the public. It appears to inform them and to make them more inquisitive so that they ask more questions. Large numbers of people also believe that DTCA increases their knowledge on prescription medications. All that, if true, is presumably a good thing.

“At the same time, many people feel that DTCA sometimes raises their concerns about prescription medications and their physicians. A reasonable conclusion could be that this is also positive as consumers should be concerned about the safety and appropriateness of the drugs which are available to them.

“The most equivocal finding is the 21 percent who report that DTCA motivates them to schedule visits with their doctors. If many of these visits are unnecessary that, presumably, is a bad thing. However, if many of these visits result in a better diagnosis or a better treatment (or even a treatment for a previously untreated condition), that is presumably a good thing. It is likely that DTCA does some of both….”

“Learning is a treasury whose keys are queries.”

– Arabian proverb